


Thirds

by funkmetalalchemist



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, M/M, Multi, just one big puddle of fluff, like gooey gross fluffy mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 21:56:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3265748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/funkmetalalchemist/pseuds/funkmetalalchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armin, Jean, and Reiner take turns explaining how they ended up together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirds

When you asked them how they all got together, none of them really knew the answer with any definitiveness. Each supplemented their own set of details as they felt necessary, but neither Reiner, Jean, nor Armin could agree on any sort of precise moment that they’d all come together.

When you asked Reiner, he would talk about Jean first. Not because Jean was any more important in his mind than Armin, but because how he fell in love with Armin was relatively simple. Armin was sweet and kind and cute and oh, God, have you seen his eyes? Armin had been a blessing in his rather blessingless life from the moment they’d first met. Frankly, it was shocking that Reiner hadn’t asked him out then and there. But with Jean, it was slightly more complicated. Sure, Jean was decent-looking, but he wasn’t exactly sweet or kind or actually particularly that good of a person, now that he thinks about it.

“I didn’t hate Jean,” Reiner would say, holding up his arms as if to pacify an accusing look that wasn’t really there. “Just didn’t think he was that great. And to be perfectly honest, he wasn’t when I first met him. He was an ass.”

This was about where Jean would butt in to try and argue against Reiner’s point and claim that he had always been a good guy. Of course, even Jean knew this was a blatant lie. Eventually, Reiner would wrap his arm around Jean’s waist, pull him in close, and then put his lips to Jean’s forehead and keep them there with his eyes shut gently until Jean finally shut up. Somewhere behind him, he knew Armin would be rolling his eyes and smiling. Reiner was used to this by now.

Once Jean quieted down, Reiner would continue with his story. He would talk about how yeah, like he was saying, Jean was an ass when they first met in high school. Reiner and he hadn’t talked very often, and most of their interactions were limited to pulling him apart from Eren Jaeger when they were getting too close to being in a fight. Then they’d met at a party in college. Reiner hadn’t even known Jean went to his school. Didn’t even know that it was Jean who he’d run into, if he was being honest. He’d gotten a few inches taller, lost the braces, sported a new haircut, and gained a nameless sort of aura of _something_ that had only ever been a flicker in their high school years. Jean smiled brilliantly and once Reiner realized who exactly he was, he couldn’t help but give a slight lift at the corner of his mouth in return.

They hadn’t hung out, much. Reiner was, at that point, spending a great deal of time with Armin. Reiner would say he was courting him, in the sense that they were friends who hung out every day, but who never moved anywhere past a brush of fingers while passing study notes in the library. Reiner had pined, that year. Now Reiner would blushingly wave a hand and move on, embarrassed to talk about it.

“Then there was Jean,” he would change the subject smoothly. “Jean and I went on a casual date that same year and hit it off.” Jean had become this new person who Reiner found he not only liked to be around, but wanted to be around more. So, eventually, it was a brush of two different sets of hands (“One small, one medium,” Reiner joked as he pointed a finger towards Armin and Jean, respectively) against his own that stopped his breath before it reached his lungs and made his heart kick against his ribs. It was wonderful, he would say, and there was a wistful sort of look in his eyes that the two others would share in as well, if only for just a moment before they would return to speaking.

Then, he would say, it all happened kind of quickly. He wouldn’t exactly remember the details. He wouldn’t remember who had initiated their conversation, but Reiner and Jean both confessed to each other that they had harbored feelings for Armin for a while. It had taken a while, a few outings of just the three of them – movies, dinners, ice skating – before Armin finally recognized these excursions for what they were: dates. And then they were together.

Reiner would snap, before giving a small shake of his head with a grin. “Just like that,” he would finish.

When you would ask Jean, he would seem to be in it more to refute what Reiner had said than anything else.

“First off,” he would begin, crossing his arms and looking at Reiner, eyes inviting a playful challenge, “I liked Reiner in middle school. He didn’t even know we went to middle school together, did you hear that? We did.” Jean would blow a raspberry to Reiner at around this point, and Reiner would accordingly catch it as if it were a blown kiss and tuck it into the breast pocket of his shirt. Jean would break then, laughing away any feigned anger he’d been trying to get across.

Jean would talk about how he’d had the world’s biggest crush on Reiner in middle school. He’d talk about how chubby Reiner had been, how chubby Jean himself was. When they met Armin in high school, he was one of the smallest, skinniest ones there, but Jean and Reiner had tummies and cheeks and meaty arms. Jean’s would melt away once he hit puberty, but Reiner’s would stay there, just changing in shape. It would develop into a muscular, thick weight. His legs would show the most tone. The short shorts he’d worn in rugby-

It is about here that Jean would catch himself rambling and try to get back on track.

Reiner, he would say, had picked up a piece of paper for him one day in the hallway.

“That was it?” Armin would ask with a laugh.

“That was it,” Jean would respond. He would swear up and down that was their only actual interaction in middle school, and that was the one thing that made him fall deeply in love. He couldn’t remember them having any real classes together, but they had gym at the same time, albeit with different teachers. So, they did not interact. This did not stop Jean from talking to Marco about Reiner constantly, to the point where Marco and Jean had gotten in their first fight because Jean would simply not stop.

“You got in your first fight with Marco over me?” Reiner would whisper into Jean’s hair before taking a deep breath in through his nose, breathing in the lavender of his shampoo. Reiner’s arm would give a little squeeze at Jean’s waist, and his fingers would start brushing up and down that small section of the point between the side of his ribs and his hipbone. Jean’s eyes would flutter, and he would continue while Armin remarked that he was too easily distracted.

But then, Jean would clarify, nodding solemnly to both Armin and Reiner, that once he’d hit high school, he was totally over Reiner. Moved on. He’d gone through a cornucopia of different high school crushes, moving on from one to the next before he could let himself register whether he’d actually _really_ liked someone. He hadn’t dated in high school, not really.

“And yes, Reiner,” he would say before Reiner could, “That does mean that you were my first real date.”

Armin would breathe a word of admiration and lean up to kiss each of them on the cheek at that point. Each of them would let their eyes follow him for a moment once he’d turned away, then like clockwork, the two would turn back to you at the same time, Reiner barely concealing a smile and Jean biting his lip and blushing before he continued.

“Once we got to college, it was pretty clear to me that I did like Armin. It wasn’t just one of those little five-second high school crushes, like the one I’d had with him a few years prior. It hit me in the gut. It felt wonderful. It was a good feeling, that sort of permanence. I hadn’t known it was real until then. And then,” he would continue with a little shake of his head while he stared at Reiner with admiration, “you asked me out. Out of the blue. I hadn’t even realized you’d be interested. And all those years later, too. And so I said yes, not only because you were the man of my middle school dreams, but also kind of to distract me from Armin, who was so out of my league I figured it would be nice to get my mind off of things.”

Reiner would jokingly pretend to be offended by this. Armin and Jean would each touch him to placate him; Armin with a hand running up and down Reiner’s bicep, and Jean with a slick hand against the back pocket of Reiner’s pants.

Jean would then, hand still surreptitiously resting on Reiner’s ass, describe how taken aback he was when he found that his middle school feelings for Reiner hadn’t dulled, but rather sharpened into something more adult, more sincere, shaped by their interactions into a kind of love he didn’t really have a name for until then. It had taken Jean so by surprise.

And then Jean would think, frowning, before finally admitting he didn’t really remember how exactly it worked out in the end, either. There was a conversation, Jean agreed, where they spoke about Armin, and how they both felt something. And then there were “outings” and Jean, to be perfectly honest, didn’t actually remember the moment where Armin revealed he knew they were taking him on dates. He wasn’t sure it _was_ a moment. He thought it was more sort of a gradual thing. It was never _one day they were outings, the next they were dates_. It was a slow movement. Very gradually they moved from one to the other, like steeping tea in hot water.

“Then,” Jean would finish eloquently, “some other stuff happened and now we’re here.”

Armin would pat him on the shoulder.

When you would ask Armin, he would hold up a finger, as if telling you to wait. And you would wait. And then, a few minutes later, in the middle of a conversation, he would spare a glance at Reiner and Jean to make sure they weren’t listening before he started.

He would begin with the fact that he had known Reiner and Jean since high school. They hadn’t gone to the same middle school, but Armin had known which middle school it was that they’d attended before this, because that was the type of person he was. He liked to know about the people surrounding him, and so when he encountered someone new, he would find out what he could about them. Armin would concur with Reiner, that Jean had been something of a jackass in high school. He had known Jean somewhat better than Reiner back then because Jean had the fortune of being the worst enemy of one of Armin’s best friends. So, what little exposure he had to Jean was Jean making an ass of himself while Armin’s friend, Eren, also made an ass of himself. Not a fantastic first impression, Armin would wink. Armin did, however, bond with Jean’s friend Marco as each of their best friends argued with one another. It wasn’t friendship, not really, but there was a mutual respect there.

Reiner, he hadn’t known as well, Armin would disclose. They didn’t have classes together and the only time their schedules ever overlapped over the years was lunchtime. He was in chess club with Reiner’s best friend, but he and Bertholdt rarely spoke. Occasionally, Reiner would come to chess club practices, and from what Armin could tell, he was quite skilled. Armin surmised that he was not in the club itself because most of his time was occupied with sports. What Armin knew about Reiner, he’d mostly gotten out of Eren, who had been on the wrestling team with him. Reiner seemed smart, loyal, and not a bad person, although, Armin would admit, his memories might be a little bit influenced by his current bias.

“College changed things,” Armin would muse, looking up distractedly somewhere between wall and ceiling.

“Obviously,” Armin’s hand would give a little wave and he would roll his eyes because you’d have already heard this part, “I became close to Reiner first.”

Then, Reiner started dating Jean, then they started dating Armin.

Here, Armin would pause to think for a moment, and Jean and Reiner would pass nearby and Armin would smile at them and though Jean and Reiner had each been smiling at Armin first, they didn’t really smile until after they’d seen Armin’s face. Their own faces would reflect the bright sunlight of Armin’s happiness right back at him and all three of them appeared to be soaking it in. Finally, once they went back to what they were doing, Armin continued.

He would purse his lips carefully before quietly admitting that he did not, at first, love either one of them. They were friends. They studied together, they occasionally hung out together, and Armin had liked them, genuinely liked them. But even when Reiner and Jean had begun dating, what Armin felt for them was nothing more than a vague sense of warmth that came with close friendship.

“It was not, however,” Armin finally insisted, “gradual.” Not for him. It was immediate. When Jean and Reiner had casually offered to treat him to dinner, Armin knew. He knew, he would say with a fragile sincerity, not for any logical reason in particular, but just that (and here Armin’s voice would lower into a whisper) he could feel it in the way his heart sped up, for no real reason. “And that was the moment. We’d eaten together a hundred times before that, but right when those words left their lips, I knew that they wanted to be with me and I knew that I wanted to be with them.”

Here, Jean and Reiner’s heads would tilt in his direction, keen ears picking up the end of Armin’s sentence. They would teasingly call after him as they came up on either side of him and pressed dual kisses into his temples. Armin’s eyes would close, tight, and his grin would grow wide and toothy.

“Talking about us?” one of them would ask, voice soft as they leaned over so their lips could reach down to Armin’s ears.

And Armin would nod and the three of them would knit closer together until it became clear that they were not three separate stories, but one.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to my beta katie and thanks for reading  
> also, i just have to throw it out there that the name for armin/jean/reiner should 100% be "tall/grande/venti"


End file.
